Salesforce will hire 2,000 people to sell AI products, says CEO Benioff

Salesforce will hire 2,000 people to sell artificial intelligence software to customers, CEO Marc Benioff said Tuesday, twice as many as the company said it would hire a month ago.

The cloud software company, which targets salespeople, marketers and customer service representatives, is among the many tech companies looking to use generative AI capabilities to boost revenue.

“We’re hiring a few thousand more salespeople to help sell these products,” Benioff said at a company event in San Francisco. “We already had 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 open positions. This is amazing.”

Last month, Benioff said Bloomberg that the plan is to hire 1,000 salespeople with a focus on AI.

Salesforce announced on Tuesday second generation Part of its Agentforce technology for building and operating AI agents will be available to customers in February 2025. Agentforce will be able to answer challenging questions in Salesforce’s Slack communications app based on all available data.

Almost two years after the announcement, Salesforce is expanding its AI sales team dismissed more than 7,000 employees in order to better reflect the economic conditions. As of January 31, 2024, the number of employees was 72,682, about 1% less than two years ago Submissions.

Benioff said Salesforce’s homepage now includes an experimental AI agent that can respond to user queries about the company’s products. Salesforce customers who need help can visit a chat Help page which conducts 32,000 conversations per week. According to Benioff, about 5,000 cases will be transmissible to humans due to current AI capabilities, a decrease from 10,000 previously.

Microsoft has sold a range of Copilot-branded AI tools. But if you look on Microsoft’s website to see how it automates customer support, you won’t find it, Benioff says.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.